My phone died, we got lost, but it wasn't the mountain that scared me

Four years ago, we attempted to climb England's highest mountain, Scafell Pike.

We came close but we never made it.

For one, it was July 2022 and Amanda and I were both suffering badly from Covid.

No energy. Cold sweats. Foggy heads. Coughing and spluttering.

We should never have attempted it feeling so rough, but we're both stubborn.

The higher we climbed, the thicker the cloud. It was wet, cold and visibility down to a few metres.

At least we had a route to follow on my phone.

Until it died as we started our approach to the summit.

And suddenly we were lost, climbing the mountain blind, feeling like death.

Apparently, I was swaying so badly that Amanda and Thomas were climbing behind me expecting to catch me at any moment.

I was more worried about being lost and not being able to find our way back to our holiday cottage in the poor visibility.

In retrospect, we made two major mistakes.

Obviously, the first was hiking when we were so ill.

The second was that only one of us had the route.

And when my phone died, we had no back-up plan.

I didn't even have a compass or a paper map.

It wasn't the mountain that scared me – it was the isolation.

It's a fear I like to play with when I'm writing thrillers.

Characters cut off from help and support.

Who either can't trust a spouse. Or have a reason they can't call the police.

And it's delicious.

Take my psychological thriller, The Warning, about a woman who moves to a new house in a remote corner of Cornwall with her husband.

She's already isolated – but then she finds a mobile phone in the attic.

And gets the shock of her life when it lights up with an incoming message, 'Don't trust your husband.'

And now she's also isolated from the one person she thought she could trust.

For the next few days, The Warning is on sale for just 99p / 99c in the UK and US.

Please grab a copy and see what I mean.

And if you're in Kindle Unlimited, you can read it for free!

Anyway, all's well that ends well.

We did manage to get down from the mountain.

After around ten minutes of panic, I managed to reboot my phone and pick up the route again.

Although we never did get to the summit.

But hopefully we're going to put that right in the next few days.

We're heading back to the Lake District in the north west of England to attempt to finally summit Scafell Pike.

And this time, we will definitely be taking two phones. Two routes. A back-up map. A compass. And flares. Well, maybe not flares…

The Thriller Couple

The drive to the Lake District is around a 360-mile journey that will probably take us in the region of eight hours.

That means the three of us (Thomas is coming too) have eight long hours to argue over which podcasts to listen to.

Whether we should attempt an audiobook. But which audiobook?

And then poor Thomas will have to listen to us predict the end and argue about inciting incidents and mid-point reversals. 😂

It will be worth it when we get there.

Although whether Thomas insists on getting the train home, we'll have to wait and see…